In the summer of 1887, after having been three years in Boston and
six years absent from my old home in northern Iowa, I found
myself with money enough to pay my railway fare to Ordway,
South Dakota, where my father and mother were living, and as it
cost very little extra to go by way of Dubuque and Charles City, I
planned to visit Osage, Iowa, and the farm we had opened on Dry
Run prairie in 1871.

Up to this time I had written only a few poems and some articles
descriptive of boy life on the prairie, although I was doing a good
deal of thinking and lecturing on land reform, and was regarded as
a very intense--disciple of Herbert Spencer and Henry George a
singular combination, as I see it now. On my way westward, that
summer day in 1887, rural life presented itself from an entirely
new angle. The ugliness, the endless drudgery, and the loneliness
of the farmer's lot smote me with stern insistence. I was the
militant reformer.

The farther I got from Chicago the more depressing the landscape
became. It was bad enough in our former home in Mitchell
County, but my pity grew more intense as I passed from northwest
Iowa into southern Dakota. The houses, bare as boxes, dropped on
the treeless plains, the barbed-wire fences running at right angles,
and the towns mere assemblages of flimsy wooden sheds with
painted-pine battlement, produced on me the effect of an almost
helpless and sterile poverty.

My dark mood was deepened into bitterness by my father's farm,
where I found my mother imprisoned in a small cabin on the
enormous sunburned, treeless plain, with no expectation of ever
living anywhere else. Deserted by her sons and failing in health,
she endured the discomforts of her life uncomplainingly--but my
resentment of "things as they are" deepened during my talks with
her neighbors, who were all housed in the same unshaded cabins in
equal poverty and loneliness. The fact that at twenty-seven I was
without power to aid my mother in any substantial way added to
my despairing mood.

My savings for the two years of my teaching in Boston were not
sufficient to enable me to purchase my return ticket, and when my
father offered me a stacker's wages in the harvest field I accepted
and for two weeks or more proved my worth with the fork, which
was still mightier--with me--than the pen.

However, I did not entirely neglect the pen. In spite of the dust and
heat of the wheat rieks I dreamed of poems and stories. My mind
teemed with subjects for fiction, and one Sunday morning I set to
work on a story which had been suggested to me by a talk with my
mother, and a few hours later I read to her (seated on the low sill
of that treeless cottage) the first two thousand words of "Mrs.
Ripley's Trip," the first of the series of sketches which became
Main-Travelled Roads.

I did not succeed in finishing it, however, till after my return to
Boston in September. During the fall and winter of '87 and the
winter and spring of '88, I wrote the most of the stories in
Main-Travelled Roads, a novelette for the Century Magazine, and
a play called "Under the Wheel." The actual work of the
composition was carried on m the south attic room of Doctor
Cross's house at 21 Seaverns Avenue, Jamaica Plain.

The mood of bitterness in which these books were written was
renewed and augmented by a second visit to my parents in 1889,
for during my stay my mother suffered a stroke of paralysis due to
overwork and the dreadful heat of the summer. She grew better
before the time came for me to return to my teaching in Boston,
but I felt like a sneak as I took my way to the train, leaving my
mother and sister on that bleak and sun-baked plain.

"Old Paps Flaxen," "Jason Edwards," "A Spoil of Office," and
most of the stories gathered into the second volume of
Main-Travelled Roads were written in the shadow of these defeats.
If they seem unduly austere, let the reader remember the times in
which they were composed. That they were true of the farms of
that day no one can know better than I, for I was there--a farmer.

Life on the farms of Iowa and Wisconsin--even on the farms of
Dakota--has gained in beauty and security, I will admit, but there
are still wide stretches of territory in Kansas and Nebraska where
the farmhouse is a lonely shelter. Groves and lawns, better roads,
the rural free delivery, the telephone, and the motorcar have done
much to bring the farmer into a frame of mind where he is
contented with his lot, but much remains to be done before the
stream of young life from the country to the city can be checked.

The two volumes of Main-Travelled Roads can now be taken to be
what William Dean Howells called them, "historical fiction," for
they form a record of the farmer's life as I lived it and studied it. In
these two books is a record of the privations and hardships of the
men and women who subdued the midland wilderness and
prepared the way for the present golden age of agriculture.